More Than A Depressive Poet: On the Enduring Hope of Sylvia Plath’s Journals

In the late summer of my nineteenth year, August sunshine dancingly feathered by the slow decay of evergreen conifers (needles dropping, dropping still) lining the tail-end of our back garden, I watched as the scorching languor of early July tipped over into autumnal despondency. Some nine or so weeks of this half-infantile, half-middle-aged ennui of ‘summer-holiday’ had passed, sleepy and somnolent after the glinting buzz of a restorative Easter Term, and I felt all possible academic capabilities drain from my body to form a sticky, sickly pulp at the bottom of my feet. Strange hues of August light had melted a previously wintry confidence.

I had just finished my exams. April apprehension had me defer them to the summer period, following a hard first year of sweaty tears and doctors’ appointments and medication trials and an overwhelming and inescapable loneliness. I suppose the appropriate response to a final repose from all the reading, working, revision of a drawn-out exam-dread should have been one of comedic collapse-into-sofa, a deliciously drowsy idleness, the languid heat of summer finally come to laze about. But such clammy inactivity makes me antsy. Restlessness breeds questioning, and in that sudden space of lackadaisical ease and academic neglect, insecurity buzzed about my head, midges and mosquitoes, damselflies and green shields, the droning susurrus of whirring self-questioning. Doubt, it seems to me, brings with it a stretching-of-arms to a nostalgic past, the blubbering infant looking to parent with their solid hold and soft shushing. What was it I looked for then, in the twilight of that sweltering summer, when I turned to that great fat heaving book stoically parked year after year on my desk, and thumbed the first few pages of The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath?

I probe the question, not in the spirit of self-discovery or in exploration of some vaguely destructive desire the human psyche seeks out in times of uncertainty, but rather to illustrate the great misconceptions surrounding Sylvia Plath, perhaps the original so-called ‘unhinged’, depressive suffering woman. Yes, I understand the clichés: barbiturates-in-bloodless-hand and head-in-gas-pumping-oven and textbook-upon-textbook-of-abnormal-psychology; nightmare halls of psychiatric wards;, insomniac girl with bell jar overhead. But this is an oversimplification, a fallacy, an injustice to the astonishingly ambitious, courageous, intelligent woman she was. Suicided women are more than their suicidal intent. Perhaps supposedly mutually exclusive binaries between joyous hope and crushing depression supply an easy, rather misogynistic capacity for a brushing-off of distressed, hungry women. Perhaps marketability of the ‘hysterical’ female character (see Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl) diminishes when our speaker is in fact forever yearning towards a hopeful rebirth—birthed again into a life that ‘cheers for spring; for life; for a growing soul’, a creative splendour: ‘I want to write because I have the urge to excel in one medium of translation and expression of life… let me live, love, and say it well in good sentences’. Regardless, Plath’s journals are full of surprising hope, light, a brave battling of inner demons, a loving, literary spirit not easily overcome.

Do not be mistaken in believing that light always begets ease, a summery elation. Certainly (selfishly?), on reading Plath’s journals I felt my feet (no, not sinking into muddy, miserable melancholy, the fuelling dripdrops of gasoline lighting an apathetic despair into the trapping heights of bell jars) but, to use the cartoonish, proverbial illustration, almost quaking-in-their-boots. Paired with fears of my own literary carelessness, Plath’s aspiring and successful endeavours instilled within me a desperation, almost paralysing, for academic advancement, creative output, personal contentment. With her pencil tip scratching away on the tracing-paper overlay of a labyrinthine coming-of-age, revelling in self-governed writing tasks, various blossoming relationships, exploring avenues of summer jobs and academic research, my skin went static in panic. Yes, I could see the figs as they dropped shrivelled at my feet; far too clearly could I see the whirring streetlamps of nineteen thoughtless years pass behind, speeding away into nebulous distance. The terror of unfulfilled potential borders into immobility. I could see my options in Plath’s own words, to be active and autonomous, make a concerted effort to get where I wanted to be, or else to confine myself to a wistful, listless introspection. How resonantly she puts it: to ‘ricochet between certainties and doubt.’. An incessantly rigid thought-process; a fastiduously mechanised captivity. I drank in every word, hungry in my reading of Plath’s tenacious perseverance, her fears counteracted powerfully by her hopeful, personal voice. I needed to internalise the inspiration I felt.

Weary and wavering, but one must be brave. I try not to make this sentimental, I’m trying to convey the difficulty with which I stick to this. I must be dogged and pragmatic, imbue my life with a logical calmness that has me reach the magnanimous ambitions to which I aspire. This is not easy bathos, some fairy-tale, spiritual cliché in which I tell you ‘mindset makes all the difference’. No. More a necessary repetition, a mantra, a tethering talisman: I must be brave I must be calm I must persevere if I want my ambitions reached. To this, I owe Plath; I’d be hard-pressed to find someone else who has inspired a similar degree of determined courage and hope within me. 

Now coming to the end of my final year at Durham, with medications stabilised, doctors appeased, and my undergraduate dissertation, written on Plath herself, recently completed, I cannot help but return to the awful stereotypes which seem to cling to this courageous woman and her long-standing illness. I recall a friend of mine, in a discussion of thesis ideas, remarking how miserable, downright depressing a study of Plath’s Journals would be in its very undertaking. I remember the sardonic, cynical humour with which Plath’s final act is often approached, probed, and pulled apart. We so frequently declare that mental illness must be regarded with the same respect and kindness as physical illness, yet so many find free reign to mock those lost to psychiatric conditions with a derisive contempt bordering on the deathly cruelty of the sceptic. 

It is these very same comments of mocking cynicism which I must cast from my mind when I consider my own processes of recovery. It is to Plath I owe my most enduring hope, my most successful ambitions. Past the grey summer of nineteen, and all the deathly dark summers which came before it, I found the summer of my twentieth year one of contented productivity, working at academic internships, devoting those sweltering summer weekdays to volunteering, reading through sunny afternoons and writing into dwindling evenings. With my twenty-first summer fast approaching, and my dream master’s course on the near horizon, I must once again pay respect to the inspiring perseverance which I found in Plath’s Journals. Indeed, with the autumn taking me to the very same place Plath herself studied on coming to England, after her own experience of hospitals, medication, perseverance, recovery, and lasting hope, I seem to cling to her Journals even more. 

The importance of multitudinous remembrance cannot be understated. If we are to read her work, I feel it is our duty to recognise the strength with which Sylvia Plath fought with  illness and despair: an act no less brave for the fact that it was ultimately lost.